Figuring out many things, all at a time comes naturally to many of us. But have you ever wondered how all this is done? How the individuality of each thought is maintained and not jumbled up into thoughts that make no sense? That is the greatness of the human brain. With its many entangled neuron in the order of millions and trillions, the human brain has defeated even the super-computers in their speed of operation.

Understanding the human brain is very difficult. How it functions so meticulously still remains a question to many. Previously researchers were of the opinion that a large number of neurons had to be activated so that the human being could feel or even perceive a stimulus. But this insight into the human brain turns out to be wrong. Brain cells are even more powerful than you think.

After conducting a series of research, mostly on rodents, the researchers have concluded that the brain sifts through a large number of neurons but selects only a handful of them to evoke the necessary response. This new study can actually re-write text books emphasizing on how powerful individual brain cells or clusters of cells are to the working mind.

The brain cells are so powerful that it takes only a single cell to influence the behavior in the brain cortex. These findings enable the researchers to answer baffling questions about how the brain controls the response at the cellular level.

In one of the experiments, researchers genetically engineered selected few brain cells of active mice so that those cells would respond to a stimulus due to light. By adjusting the intensity of light, the smallest number of cells required to produce a measurable response was found out to be less than fifty. Moreover this selection is made even more remarkable by the fact that it took place amidst a background of neurological “noise” produced by the other million of cells. In this way a hundred other such action potentials are developed and the brain has the capability to distinguish each and every potential from the disturbance in the background.

This experiment strongly backs up a theory known as “sparse coding”. According to this theory the neurons which listen to other activated neurons should be able to pick up very sparse, tiny subsets of activity.

Previously it was generally believed that synapses act on their own accord. They behave very independently and that the long term activation was the main step in creating memory. But new research has shown that co-operation and not individualism is their main working principle. Each synapse strengthens the other synapses are around it. In this way they co-operatively strengthen each others bonds and this team work takes place within a specific time frame. These generally take place for ten minutes. This is enough to lay down memory which could lead to learning.

For this experiment the mice were left in a chamber and were allowed to roam around freely. After sometime when they were removed they still had a vivid memory of that chamber because of these synaptic clusters.

Though most of the research was carried out on mice, the human brain is also expected to work on the same lines, though on a much larger scale. While the mice have only a hundred million neurons, the human brain overrides everyone with a whooping hundred million neurons.

Though this research was performed on a healthy brain, it is being extended for the aged and the diseased brain also. By a perfect understanding of the functioning of the brain and realizing how powerful brain cells are, an insight into neurodegenerative disorders can be gained.

These researches clearly prove that all brain cells are of the utmost importance to us and we should do our best to maintain them. But on account of the brain cells being so powerful, that number is very flexible and each cell can activate a huge number of others.